The 1990's decade has been marked by a technological revolution driven by the convergence of the data processing industry with the consumer electronics industry. This advance has been even further accelerated by the extensive consumer and business involvement in the Internet over the past few years. As a result of these changes, it seems as if virtually all aspects of human endeavor in the industrialized world requires human/computer interfaces. There is a need to make computer directed activities accessible to a substantial portion of the world's population which, up to a few years ago, was computer illiterate or, at best, computer indifferent. In order for the vast computer supported market places to increase in productivity, it will be necessary for a large segment of consumers of limited computer skills to relate to computer interfaces. Thus, the challenge of our technology is to create interfaces to computers which are as close to the real world as possible. Among the various expedients for conveying realism in interfaces is the use of displayed objects which are images of the real world elements and functions which the objects represent. To increase the realism of objects, visual clues are used such as depth and spatial perception conveyed through advanced computer graphical rendering techniques. All of such efforts make the work of user interface developers and designers more complex and challenging. The present invention should provide such developers with one more tool which they may use in their challenging tasks.
In order to convey real world perceptions which will make users of the interfaces feel more at home or comfortable, displayed objects are frequently environmentally related or associated with each other, e.g. buildings on a street, stores in a mall, or books on a shelf. In such an environment, rich visual clues may be conveyed to users by representing the depth and spatial relationships of the interface objects. This requires that the objects be defined with dimensions which constitute the objects' relative height, width, depth, distance etc. In order to present information in a way that human users are familiar with from their interactions in the real or physical world, these dimensions are proportional to the corresponding dimensions of the real world elements which the displayed objects represent. Unfortunately, in such image rendering, problems may arise because the real world is big and, perhaps, dimensionally unlimited while the computer display screen or window is small and, of course, dimensionally limited.
With objects having dimensions which are very large or very small in comparison to their associated objects or in comparison to the display screen or window, we have recognized that there are problems in presenting such objects. Conventionally, the display interface technology has solved these problems by scrolling, i.e. when large objects cause the environment of objects to expand beyond the screen or window limits, showing only a portion of the object and scrolling to the rest as needed. On the other hand, if there are objects relatively too small to be perceived on the display screen, then increasing the relative proportions of all of the objects which will, of course, expand the environment of objects beyond the limits of the screen and then scrolling to objects as needed. While scrolling may, under certain interactive circumstances, be an appropriate real world equivalent, e.g. strolling down a street or a mall aisle, there are many instances when scrolling is an entirely inappropriate real world metaphor. For example, if the object environment is a set of books on a user's desk or file titles in a draw sleeve, in the real world environment the user will see all of the book objects at a glance. Thus, the need to scroll through a group of books may disrupt the real world "sitting at your desk" metaphor.